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Wednesday, January 23, 2019

"This is my body, broken for you," the pastor intones, tearing a loaf of cheap Hawaiian bread down the middle as he prepares the elements for the communion service.

I sit in a pew a few rows back arms folded across a ribcage that once protruded sharply from my skin, and wonder how another broken body benefits this world. 

As he he lifts up a cup and proclaims Christ's blood spilled for me, quickly clarifying that it is grape juice and not wine, I subconsciously run my fingers over the faded scars on my wrists, thinking of the night that my own blood ran red, covering the bathroom floor. No, I think, I do not want more blood poured out on my behalf.

His voice is just the right amount of solemn and reverent and emotional as he says, "Do this in remembrance of me." 

But I can’t carry the weight of remembering, can’t hold another traumatized body in addition to my own: can't take on more sweat-drenched memories or paralyzing flashbacks, the unrelenting heaviness of knowing.

I stay seated in my pew as the congregants line up to take part in the communion table / I am unable to stomach the violence in that juice-soaked piece of bread, unable to consume another’s pain so easily.

As the congregants begin to return to their seats in silence, contemplating the broken body of their Lord, I look down at my body, which too, has been broken, but for which there is no weekly gathering to commemorate its suffering. 

My pain is etched into my skin, my body bearing witness to the unbearable; it is in scars and scratches, burn marks and bruises, in a worn down esophagus and a heart that beats a little too slowly. Who, I wonder, will remember this body, this malnourished, mistreated body?

.....

I am sixteen years old.

A nurse at a treatment center comes to call us for dinner and we obediently file into a cold, clinical cafe where plates of prepared food are set in front of us.

"Are we ready?" a woman asks, wearing a staff name badge that unlocks the doors that keep us caged in. When a few heads nod around the table, she starts a small timer. "Alright ladies, you may begin."

I stare down at the plate in front of me, filled with chicken and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and in this moment, it seems like a herculean task to lift fork to mouth. 

"Just one bite, Lindsay," the woman says softly, in an attempt to encourage me. "You've got to try."

But there is a yellow feeding tube already shoved up my nose, pulsing calories into my stomach, and my brain cannot comprehend why I also need to pick up my fork and eat.

Food is life, and life is not something I am particularly interested in. I am being kept alive against my will, against ever cell in my body that is so very world-weary. 

I sit in silence through the meal, staring blankly at chicken and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and imagine myself somewhere where the Monsters in my mind did not exist.


.....

It is ten years later and she is crying in the hallway of a different treatment center,  and I roll a pole that connects me to my tube feedings over to her, kneeling down beside her as she struggles to gasp for air between sobs. 

She is re-living her multiple rapes.

"Do you want to be alone right now?" I ask her softly.
"No," she says, her voice thick with tears, "Please, no." 

I pull her close and she holds me so tightly I think I'll break, and we stay there for what seems like an eternity, the raw, gut-wrenching pain of our traumas flooding both of our fragile bodies.


.....

In Bessel van der Kolk's seminal text on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, he writes of a veteran who refuses medication for his nightmares in order to be a living memorial for his fallen friends. He doesn't want to forget.

It's been almost a year now, almost a full year out.

As I navigate this world in a body made strong by months of adequate nutrition, sometimes I too wonder if healing means forgetting. 

"No, Lindsay," she says to me, "Healing and recovery are tools of empowerment."

But my sickly shell of a body was a living testament to the terrors I had seen. There was no turning away, no denying the gruesome details of my pain, when I was on death's door. 

I understand the veteran's dilemma. 

If I come down from the cross and move into resurrection, who will remember the trauma I lived through? Who will remember my friends, the ones lost to the Other World because their pain was too strong to bear? 

Each week, the pastor lifts up the bread and cup, honoring one body torn apart by violence. 

Each week, I stay seated in the pew as the rest of the church rises, and think of all the broken bodies that go unnamed and forgotten. 

Although my body no longer serves as monument to my pain, now colored in and fleshed out, I refuse to forget. 

Instead of remembering a broken body through a bite of wine-soaked bread, I go to lunch after the church service. I order a full plate of pasta and eat every bite, doing this act of nourishment and Life in remembrance of them, the ones who lived through the unbearable and did not survive. 

My flesh is still a living testament, but differently now. I am bound to them, to the women I wept with and held and talked through panic attacks. My body carries their stories alongside my own deep in the marrow of my bones. But the world does not need me to continually offer up my body as sacrifice on their behalf. The world does not need me to perpetuate more pain. 

So it is in remembrance of their suffering, of my own suffering, that I live. 
It is with each bite of food that moves me towards wholeness, that I do in remembrance of us.